Using Text messaging in the ESL classrrom

January 11, 2010

After reading Chapter 1 of From Blogs to Bombs I thought it was a good idea to test my digital native students to see if they were able to understand the txtspk in the book.To my surprise most of them found this activity quite challenging. Out of 25 students not only one was able to understand the whole text.They couldn`t believe that this was an essay a student sent to their teacher. We had a very interesting debate on text messaging.

I would like to test you this time. Have you ever read Romeo and Juliet in Text messaging? Let??s see how much you understand.

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This is so fascinating to me, as I studied Spanish when I was a child. It’s so innovative and uses so many different ways to get meaning across (like English txtspk, I suppose, which I also don’t know). It uses sound-alike words and numbers (100pre, from cien/siem; b7s from siete/sit…), letter names (bb, d2…), reduced pronunciation (y for ll), deleted consonants (asias), deleted vowels (msj, dfcl…), one letter to replace two (x for ch, w for gu, including the unSpanish k for c/qu…), English words and onomatopoeia (grrr)… It’s so creative! Thanks so much for sharing!

So when Spanish speakers use text messaging, do they usually spell out all the words? I wonder how this plays out in other languages as well. In English, the consonants are paramount, the vowels not so much; we can often omit the vowels and still get the drift from the consonants + context. Hawaiian would be impossible (I think it has only 8 consonants sprinkled amidst myriads of vowels). Spanish has more consonants but I think they carry somewhat less meaning than English consonants do. Am I making this up?<br><br>Maybe there is another way to abbreviate written language that does not involve the omission of vowels.

@Nina, I guess it’s a bit difficult to do txtspk in Spanish as it’s not as sound language as English, I hope you can get my idea. I’m not saying we cannot do it, I’m saying it’s a bit more complicated! 🙂